But the white figures, though closer, were just walking purposefully after Armentrout and Long John Beach now, and staring at them with eyes that seemed yellow and bloodshot against the crusted white faces. The clay plastered onto their swimsuit-clad bodies made them seem to be naked sexless creatures animated out of the wet cliffs.
Armentrout let go of the lever that controlled the mannikins’ heads, in order to reach into his jacket pocket and grip the butt of the .45 derringer. The Styrofoam heads now nodded and rolled loosely with every jouncing step toward the cement pilings of the wooden municipal stairway that led up to the parking lot, and to the car, and away from this desolate shoreline.
But Long John Beach stopped and pointed back at the advancing mud-people.
“No outrageous thing,” he cried, his voice flat and unechoing in the open air, “from vassal actors can be wiped away; then kings’ misdeeds cannot be hid in clay.”
For a moment Armentrout considered just leaving the crazy old man standing here, as a cast-off distraction to occupy the dancers while he himself trotted away to the car; but he knew now that he needed to find Koot Hoomie Parganas, and he would need every scrap of mask for that.
So Armentrout stopped too, and he turned to face the advancing animated statues; and with deliberate slowness he tugged the fist-sized gun free and let them see it. He gripped the ball-butt tightly, for he remembered that the little derringer tended to rotate in his hand when he pulled the hammer back against the tight spring, and now he cocked it with a crisp, ratcheting click.
“What business,” Armentrout said, “exactly, do you have with us?”
One of the figures, breastless and so probably a young man, stepped forward. “You took something,” came a high voice, “from up the stairs.”
“I did? What did I take?”
The figure’s blue eyes blinked. “You tell me.”
“Answer my question first. I asked you what exactly your business is here.”
The stony figures shuffled uneasily on the wet black-veined sand, and Armentrout suppressed a smile; for these were young people whose random propensities for music and dancing and the beach had happened to constitute a compelling resemblance to an older, mythic role in this season of insistent definition—but they were just San Diego County teenagers of the 1990s, and when they were challenged to explain their presence here, the archaic hum of the inarticulate purpose was lost beneath the grammar of reason.
“No law against dancing,” the figure said defensively.
“There is a law about concealed weapons,” another piped up.
The modern phrases had dispelled the mythic cast—they were now thoroughly just modern kids on a beach, with mud all over them.
“Scram,” said Armentrout.
The white figures began to amble away south with exaggerated nonchalance. Armentrout put the gun away and turned toward the stairs. A blue sign on the railing said,
WARNING
Stay Safe Distance
Away From Bluff Bottom
FREQUENT BLUFF FAILURE
Not today, Armentrout thought with satisfaction as he shooed Long John Beach ahead of him up the stairs.
IN THE parking lot between landscaped modern apartment buildings, Armentrout unstrapped the two-mannikin appliance and stowed it in the back seat of his teal-blue BMW.
Then he opened the passenger-side door and pushed Long John Beach inside. “Belt up,” he said breathlessly to the old man.
“The purest treasure mortal times afford,’” the one-armed old man wailed, the strange and eerily flat voice echoing now between the white stucco walls, “‘is spotless reputation; that away, men are but gilded loam or painted clay.”‘
“I said belt up,” hissed Armentrout between clenched teeth as he hurried around to the driver’s side and got in. “Anyway,” he added in shrill embarrassment as he started the engine, “there’s no hope anymore for our reputations in this town.”
As he drove back down Neptune Avenue, in the southbound lane this time, Armentrout could see a plywood sign attached to a pine tree beside the gates of the field-stone wall on his right. Black plastic letters had been attached to it once, but weather or something had caused most of them to fall away; what remained was accidental Latin:
ET IN
ARC
ADIA
EGO
Et in Arcadia ego.
And I am in Arcadia, he thought, tentatively translating the words; or, I am in Arcadia, too; or, Even in Arcadia, I am.
Armentrout reflected uneasily that the word Arcadia—with its resonances of pastoral Greek poetry and balmy, quiet gardens—probably had applied to this place, before Our Miss Figleaf had come here and killed the king; but who was the Ego that was speaking?
EVEN WHEN he had got back on the 5 Freeway, heading north through the misty morning-lit hills below the Santa Ana Mountains, Armentrout found himself still noticing and being bothered by signs on the shoulder. The frequent GAS-FOOD-LODGING l MI AHEAD signs had stark icons stenciled on them for the benefit of people who couldn’t read, and though the stylized images of a gas pump and a knife-and-plate-and-fork were plain enough, the dot-dash figure of a person on a long-H bed looked to him this morning disturbingly like a dead body laid out in state; and while he was still south of Oceanside he saw several postings of a sign warning illegal Mexican immigrants against trying to sprint across the freeway to bypass the border checkpoint—the diamond-shaped yellow sign showed a silhouetted man and woman and girl-child running hand-in-hand so full-tilt fast that the little girl’s feet were off the ground, and under the figures was the word PROHIBIDO. Armentrout thought it seemed to be a prohibition of all fugitive families.
And when he became aware that his heartbeat was accelerated, he recognized that he was responding with defiance, as if the signs were reproaches aimed at him personally. I didn’t kill any king, he thought; I haven’t uprooted any families. I’m a doctor, I—
Abruptly he remembered the voice of the obese suicide-girl as he had heard it over the telephone a few hours ago: Doctor? I walk all crooked now—where’s the rest of me?
But I certainly didn’t mean that to happen, he thought, her killing herself. I don’t give anyone a treatment I haven’t undergone and benefited from myself; and from my own experience I know that cutting the problem right out of the soul, rather than laboring to assimilate it, really does effect a cure. And even when these misfortunes do result—goddammit—aren’t I allowed some sustenance? I genuinely do a lot of good for people—is it wrong for me to sometimes take something besides money for my payment? Does this make me a, a sicko? He smiled confidently—Not…at…all. The whole notion of intrinsic consequences of “sin” is just infantile solipsism, anyway: imagining that in some sense you are everybody and everybody’s you. Guilt and shame are just the unproductive, negative opposites of self-esteem, and I feel healthily good about everything I do. That’s okay today.
Then he thought of what it was he now planned for his patient Janis Cordelia Plumtree, whenever he might catch up with her, and for Koot Hoomie Parganas, if the boy was still alive—and he heard again the flat howl that had burst from Long John Beach’s throat: gilded loam or painted clay.